Simon's despatch: Lake Toba.

If you've ever watched the RAC rally driving championships on TV and wondered how on earth they learnt to drive like that, the answer's probably that they drove the tourist bus from Bukit Lawang to Toba for years first!

Once your adrenal gland has shrivelled to resemble a raisin the only course of action left to you is to develop a belief system based around the driver being an infallible deity.

He obviously believes it himself as he chooses not to wear his seatbelt whilst overtaking lorries on blind - hairpin - clifftop - can barely be called sealed - roads.

So anyway 10 hours later we just made the last ferry to Samosir island. To be fair the driver did apologise for having to "plane", which I assume means fly, to catch the ferry. He does it 5 days a week so I'm surprised leaving a little earlier hasn't occurred to him yet?

Samosir island is I believe the largest island within an island in the world. Sitting within a lake created by the eruption of super volcano Toba (credited with putting mankind through a rather narrow evolutionary bottleneck). Samosir island is the size of Singapore and a lovely relaxing place to stay - unless you're us.

One day of wandering around the village of Tuk Tuk, being accosted by 18 year old girls who only look 14 to practice english and singing with locals, was enough relaxing for us. So the next day we hired a scooter and decided to explore the island proper.

We headed around the lakeside road as recommended by the LP. Seeing some stone chairs where locals used to gather to try thieves, then next door more stone chairs and a head rest that was the last place the condemned thieves head had anything to do with it's body. I can only assume the ancient Tobans had discovered bleach as the viewing chairs were surprisingly close to the headrest.

There were also a collection of the famous batak houses with concave pitched roofs and similarly designed rice storage houses (see picture). You might be wondering why lake Toba didn't make the cover picture? Well it's simply too big! Like an ant contemplating my foot the wide angle iPhone camera could only ever see a fraction of the lake at a time - it's that awesomely huge!

In an attempt to take pictures of the lake, we headed down a little track and came across 2 little boys fishing. While I was snapping lake pics one of them caught a fish so I quickly took one of his triumphal moment. However, when I approached to show the picture to him, he became instantly suspicious of my motives and came to the only logical conclusion - I wanted the only thing of value he had - so he grabbed the fish and legged it! Do I really look that evil?

After that we headed around to the west side of the island to see a thermal spring/baths which weren't as nice as those we'd seen in NZ. Realising it would get dark soon we decided to head back and, as the island is an oblong, we decided to ignore the warnings of the LP and head straight over the middle of the island. After all we're quite hardy adventurous types and all the warnings in NZ & Oz were a big fuss about nothing so off we went.

As we started up the winding road to the spine of the island, dodging the occasional pothole, we congratulated ourselves on making a good call - the road wasn't that bad, the LP writer must have been a right sissy!

Pride comes before a fall - well almost on this occasion! As we rounded the next bend the road flipped over to being the occasional bit of road amongst the potholes and stayed that way for the next few hours. It was so bad that the best bits were the narrow mud paths that sometimes materialised at the side of the road.

Challengingly fun at first, it started to lose it's shine after an hour of mountain bike grade scootering with Beth on the back. Then it got worse as the road started narrowing and the very broken Tarmac ran out. At first this was cause for celebration as no more 2 inch steps to bump up, then the hard mud became soft mud, became puddle, became big deep puddle.

We had to resort to Beth walking for sections at this point, while I slipped, skidded and plunged through the puddles. Foot down a couple of times but luckily no falling. At this point I was seriously doubting the 'friendly' status of the friendly locals who told us it was this way. Then in the opposite direction came a person! Not a hiker or scramble biker but a distinguished gentleman in his forties with his wife sitting side saddle on their motorbike.

They passed us at a particularly muddy rutted section, without hesitation gunning the engine, slipping around abit, foot down a couple of times but both unfazed. They're hardy stock out here! They also confirmed we were going in the right direction so we, quite literally at times, ploughed on.

Luckily when we finally made it to the lakeside road, that had been recommended by the lady from whome we had borrowed the scooter, we discovered sections of it were pretty bad as well. So when we handed back the very muddy scooter, she just said "ah the road south is not good is it" we agreed and decided not to mention anything about the insane all terrain course we'd taken over the island on her lovely scooter.

Lesson learned - the LP in NZ & OZ is written with normal folk in mind. The South East Asia on a Shoestring is most definitely written for adventurous types - ignore it's warnings at your (and the scooter you've borrowed's) peril!